William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— Here, take it! Stanley said.

— I liked the part like where she's getting ready, for First Communion? "Take care of your tongue," the priest told her, "for it's the first part of you to touch the body of Our Lord. ."

The fat woman stood there, filling the doorway. She had a small mouth, lips lined with a coral shade, which she pursed impatiently. She stood there, curiously still.

The rosary flew through the air.

— Go fuck yourself!

Stanley turned his head slowly. He saw no features, only livid red streaks. The silver filigree beads rolled all over the floor. He leaned over to pick up the crucifix.

— You are possessed, said the fat woman. Stanley brought his head up slowly before her, as he recovered the crucifix, afraid of the expression on the coral lips, afraid the fat woman would knock him down in an attack on the figure behind him, whom she'd just judged: but the fat woman was looking straight at him. She watched what he was doing, and as he stood, fixed her small eyes on his. The coral lips continued to twist silently. Then she turned from the doorway and went up the passage, the yellow three-penny pamphlet in the hand with the two mean pearls.

Stanley bolted the door, and turned his back against it. The cross he held was whole, but the figure mounted there was broken across the knees, and the chin was gone. He laid it face down on the bureau and turned with a hand in his pocket, where he felt the tooth and the two pills stuck to its wrapping.

Then he was grappling with her again. At one point they were thrown a hand or two apart, and Stanley looked up to the mirror in the cabinet door for reassurance, but he saw only himself. The ship heeled over, the door swung gently to, and the mirror embraced them both again but he did not see, for at the moment he was forced to renew the struggle, with the single mirror image before his eyes.

Her strength gave out suddenly; and he finally managed to get her to take the two sleeping pills, thinking, as the second one disappeared, that he might have kept it for himself. Then he started to pick up the filigree silver beads. He found the Portiuncula card torn in half, and paused, piecing it together, but his shaking hands could not make the edges meet. He gave that up and laid it with the crucifix, stared for a full minute at the bed, and the silent figure he saw there, then looked wildly about as though indeed himself seeking a briar patch. He shuddered as though with cold, and went back to hunting the beads.

Each time he reached for one it rolled away from his hand, as he concluded a Gloria Patri on the last. Mumbling Aves in between, each time he caught one he renewed the devotion with a Paternoster, recovering, after sixteen centuries, the pebbles which the hermit Paul threw away to keep count of his daily three hundred prayers.

The stem broke a path in the water as the ship ground its way into the night, and the sea washed well below the nineteenth-century monogram on the side, a more intricate device than the cross painted at the load line on those Pilgrim Galleys carrying devotees on their quest for relics, to Jerusalem for stones from Saint Anne's church, for pregnant women, reeds for women in labor from Saint Catherine's fountain at Sinai, and for barren women, roses from Jericho.

Asleep in the chair, Stanley had a bad dream, the worse for its dreadful familiarity, though, waking in the dark, he could not remember what it was. But at hand he heard twisting, turning, moaning — Yes, if there is time yes, oh yes. . Oh yes. .

Stanley found himself perspiring freely. His clothes were damp and his drawers almost wet, still he did not dare turn on the light, fearing its confirmation of everything he imagined the darkness to hold in abeyance as he pulled a coat round him and shivered, lis- tening, to her sounds, and the pounding of his own heart driving them forward toward Gibraltar and the inland sea, as hearts have driven them down through centuries, from the ones peering into the cave at Bethlehem where the bodies of the Holy Innocents were hurled (and more than willing, upon turning round, to pay a hundred ducats for the knife-slashed body of a still-born Saracen child), to their descendents gathered at the burning of a celebrated poisoner of Paris, the Marchioness of Brinvilliers, her gifts thus solemnized at the stake, and her ashes sought as preservative against witchcraft.

Dawn broke, in the full glory of the dawn at sea. Some white birds had appeared. They hung behind the aítermast, breaking now and then 'to come down to the water for a look at anything thrown over the side. The rising sun found Stanley running damp and disheveled down a starboard deck. He paused at a ladder, hung on its wet railing to get breath, and then buttoned himself up in a number of places. He looked slightly surprised at the sun, as though it were an intruder, and might be a helpful one; but soon gave that up and carried on. His mustache looked like something he had fallen into, and his hair stood out in a heavy tangle behind. A waiter from the Tourist Class dining room stood to the rail out of his way, apparently taking for granted that Stanley was being pursued. But Stanley slid straight up to him, making a grab for him with one hand, waving the other,

— Have you seen her? Have you seen her?

— Ma signorino, che. .

But Stanley was off again; and the waiter stood there at the rail for a good half-minute looking in the direction Stanley had come from, with the unhealthy expectancy of someone who has seen a number of American moving pictures.

Stanley covered a good part of the ship. At one point he almost made the chart room. At another he skidded into a tall white-haired man in a blanket robe and straw slippers, with the same question.

— Heving a bit of a run, eh? Good thing, better for you then all the ductors. . good heavens. Ghood heavens!. .

Stanley caromed off the rail, made another ladder, and was up it. In the ship's hospital he found the bed which had been a center of activity the night before, empty. Though Stanley could hardly know it, waking as he had, alone and moist, to jump up and spill those silver filigree beads all over the floor again, she hadn't got much head start on him, and perhaps as little idea, he did realize when he found her still running, of where she was going as he had. And — Dead! she said when he did find her, and caught her wrist to hold her back.

Up the deck, now a covered one and near the water line, a group of silent men surrounded a long canvas sack, where Father Martin presided, a book in one hand, raising the other at the regular somnambulistic intervals of ritual.

— Dead!. . and that damned black andro-gyne. He did it.

— But now you. . now you. . now. .

— You know, you saw him,' too, apply the poison, and the envenomed words…

— Now now now…

— No!. . don't hold me here. .

— Some Spaniard's all it is, I heard him talk. I heard the Viaticum last night and heard him talking Spanish.

— Let me go!

Upwind on the deck, none of them heard her cry out, none of them turned at any rate; and holding her, Stanley finally realized that she was making no effort to escape him.

With a sign, Father Martin was still, and the other figures took up his motion, as slow and as careful, they slid the weighted canvas bundle over the side.

With the splash, the birds came down immediately. The men and the priest had left the rail and gone forward, for the dawn was very bright on the water, and dazzled the eyes. Then she broke away from him and ran toward the rail. Stanley hesitated in surprise, and then started after her to hold her before she could jump.

But she stopped, and stared down at the dazzling sea.

Stanley stopped, and recollected enough to cross himself. Then he looked out, at the glare of the sea stretching everywhere the sky was not, and the notion of land as impossible to him as daylight on wakening from a nightmare, the sea the man had come out of, and gone back to. Then he recalled his dream: he had been crossing the street, carrying a tiny shawl-wrapped figure, and he met Anselm.